NSF Head: All Hail the Cluster

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NSF Head: All Hail the Cluster

A large-scale computing collaboration between Google, IBM and the National Science Foundation holds the key to some of science's most pressing puzzles, NSF director Arden Bement said in a conversation Friday with Wired editors. Bement predicted that the ambitious Cluster Exploratory collaboration could lead to breakthroughs in climate modeling, reverse-engineering the brain and predicting chaotic behavior on the power grid.

The recently announced cloud-computing research facility contains 1,600 processors, several terabytes of memory and hundreds of terabytes of storage. The NSF estimates that 10-15 lucky researchers will get access to the facility in its first year of operation.

"We're trying to understand what problems are best attacked with this technology," Bement said, singling out the emergent behaviors of large systems as a likely candidate for studying with distributed computing methods.

We cherry-picked a few of the applications for cluster computing that Bement discussed:

• Adaptive systems technology is an interdisciplinary field in which researchers are attempting to convert new neuroscientific knowledge (like connectomic data) to create more natural interfaces between humans and our machines. Bement tabbed it "reverse-engineering the brain." The NSF requested $15 million (.pdf) in funding for the effort in fiscal year 2009.

• Power grid behavior: Energy generation and transmission are beginning to receive a major tech overhaul with new sensors giving power companies massive amounts of new data about the making and usage of electricity. Studying the cyber-physical system of an increasingly sophisticated electric power grid will become increasingly important as utilities allow a wider array of power-making technologies onto the grid. Bement noted that it's necessary to model how the "emergence of an upset condition" that disrupts electricity service arises, and how it can be avoided.

• Climate modeling: Bement highlighted climate modeling as a major priority for the NSF. The interactions between atmospheric greenhouse gas sources and so-called carbon dioxide sinks that sequester carbon need to be better understood, he said. And, as we've noted before, the resolution of our climate models needs to get better to help countries prepare and adapt to climate change.

But don't expect a Darpa-style climate-change prize out of the NSF.Despite some internal support for the idea, Bement said it was unlikely the NSF would join the X-Prize bandwagon. "Prizes are not the sort of thing we do best," he said.

The former Purdue professor of nuclear engineering touched on a variety of other topics, most prominently science education and its importance to American strategic competitiveness. Bement warned that the oft-noted flattening of the world economic playing field could lead to a "reverse diaspora" in which foreign scientists returned home. Without enough homegrown scientists to replace them, the preeminence of U.S. research institutions could disappear. "I lose sleep over it," Bement said.